This is a piece from my archives. But it’s a good reminder of my brick walls today. “Brick walls are there for a reason,” said Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor who so poignantly taught us how to die in the years after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “They let us prove...

Today I have the honor of interviewing Owen Stanley Surman, M.D., a practicing hospital psychiatrist known internationally for his work on psychiatric and ethical aspects of solid organ transplantation. Following the death of his wife, Dr. Surman devoted six years to writer a memoir, “The Wrong Side of an Illness: A Doctor’s Love Story,” which...